How To Automatically Back Up Your Dark Souls 3 Saves

The PC version of Dark Souls III, available through Steam, does not support the platform’s cloud sync, that is, its saves aren’t periodically backed up online. If you’re one to worry about your game saves, this should make your hair stand on end, especially if you’re in the middle of your first playthrough and aren’t sure if you’d be able to get through that absolute bastard of a boss again.

Hard disks have been known to develop problems causing corruption of data, or sputter to a complete stop, taking all any and all data to the grave. A dead HDD isn’t the only possibility that owners of the game have to worry about, though. It seems certain mischievous players are going about invading other players’ worlds or summoning them for duels, then setting their characters up for a “soft-ban” from online play with recipes right out of hacker hell.

A set of hacks employed by a player going by the name Malcolm Reynolds apparently allows him to become completely invisible, and instantly teleport to phantoms or the host of a world, and wail away at them. Being hit by his character has caused players to be booted to Firelink Shrine with a set of effects that the game detects as an illegal modification, giving the victims an “Invalid Game Data” warning. An investigation from the game’s support staff follows, which can lead to the aforementioned soft-ban. The soft-ban isn’t immediate, though. You have time to reverse any modifications that were made to your game’s data by reverting to an old save file.

Whether it’s the hackers or your computer’s hard disk that concerns you, one of the following two tools – made specifically for the game – should help put your mind at ease.

Developed by svaalbard, Dark Souls 3 Save Game Backup Tool will automatically create a backup of your Dark Souls III save file at an interval of one to 59 minutes. All you have to do is run the tool and click the Start button before launching the game. The application also skips backup creation if the game isn’t running and allows you to restore backups in a couple of clicks. All backups are created within the Dark Souls III save folder, named according to the date and time of their creation to help you with restoration.

It is definitely the better of the two options discussed here, though it does lack one feature that might prove to be handy if you fear your hard disk is nearing its end and plan to save your backups to the cloud.

Dark Souls Auto Backup Tool by Reddit user EntityZero doesn’t have a GUI or the ability to quickly restore backups, but it does allow you to specify the directory to which your saves are backed up. You can use this to create backups within a folder in your Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive directory, having them constantly synced to the cloud.

To specify the source and target directory for backups, simply open the tool’s accompanying .ini file in Notepad or any other text editor, scroll down to the Dark Souls III section and replace the placeholder values for savepath3 (the location to which you want your backups to be saved) and backuppath3 (your Dark Souls III save folder).

You will have to manually enter your Dark Souls III save directory as well. Skip to the end of the post to learn where to find it.

Alternatively, you can simply create a symbolic link to your Dark Souls III saves folder within your cloud-syncing directory while continuing to use the first tool, that is, if your cloud service supports symlinks.

Dark Souls III Save File Location & Manual Backups

If you’d rather do it all without the help of the above tools, simply head on over to your Windows installation directory, toggle on the Hidden items option from within File Explorer’s View tab and navigate to Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\DarkSoulsIII. Inside, you’ll find a folder labeled with a random string of numbers. This contains your Dark Souls III save file (DS30000.sl2).

You can return to this directory after every gaming session or a couple to copy this file to another directory or your cloud drive for safekeeping.

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I'm an engineer, blogger, and graphic designer who loves creating and experimenting with different forms of online content when he's not looking for a mix of inspiration and escape in PC gaming, comic books and anime. You can find me on Twitter and Google+.